Month: June 2018

As you may have gathered from some of my earlier posts, I am organization-impaired. I’m sure that must be a recognized affliction since there appear to be so many sufferers in the world.

Symptoms include spending an hour searching for the yellow piece of paper with the title and premise for the story about the Grizzly bear who learned sign language, or the certainty that you’ve already re-written the scene you’re working on, and drawing a complete blank when you try to remember the clever password you came up with for Writers’ Market.

With all kinds of worksheets and techniques to flesh out your characters, I thought you’d be interested in mine.

Here’s the situation: Someone had to help my readers understand the progress of the police search for my protagonist. If I had been writing in the third person, it would have been easy – the omniscient narrator could just tell the readers what was going on. Or I could head jump among the characters to keep the reader up to date on the closing loop of the police. Since I was writing strictly from my protagonist’s point of view, someone has to tell him how close the cops are. Continue reading “Finding a Character”→

Pearl S. Buck Literary Journal

There are 12 contributions to this Summer 2018 Pearl S. Buck Literary Journal. The theme of this issue is Justice and Mercy. Submissions include essays, memoirs, poems, short stories, and an excerpt from a novel.

By Bob McCrillis

In a talk she gave, Anna Quindlen claimed that she only does as much research as is convenient. That’s quite a statement.

My first thought was, “Sure, if you’re already a best-selling author.” A reader told her that getting from Miami to Tampa in three hours by car was impossible, she replied, “Not in my Florida.”

Yay! I don’t have to bother with inconsistencies and impossibilities. Well, maybe not so fast. I remember a person complaining that the book he was reading wasn’t accurate. It seems that he was familiar with Paris, where the story took place, and the places and street names were all wrong. “It ruined the whole book for me,” he grumbled. Continue reading “How Much Research?”→

By Bob McCrillis

This is boring! Who in the heck told you that you could write? This isn’t writing, it’s just typing!

My internal editor pointed out the many deficiencies of my first twenty-five pages. He delights in bashing my fragile ego, doesn’t ever take a vacation or get laryngitis.

I had labored mightily and created a corpse.

My sentences were flat and lifeless. Paddy shook off his guilt over Phou.ng’s death and took point position, leading the rest of the squad into the bush. Oh, yeah? Guess it didn’t bother him too much, then, did it? Okay, it isn’t bad but it isn’t alive. Telling a story is not stringing together a series of events. I needed to get my reader involved but how? Continue reading “Personhood Added Life to My Stories”→